I borrowed my uncle's truck. I was backing up after picking up a pizza and wasn't paying enough attention - I backed full-bumper and ass-end broadside into another vehicle. I looked around, nobody was outside but me. I hauled ass and never looked back. My uncle never noticed the slight scratches on the bumper, but I guarantee the other vehicle owner saw the steel o_o on his driver/passenger side doors. It was stupid - I should have stopped and taken responsibility for my actions.

We spent nearly every summer night in high school throwing water balloons at cars then running like hell. We got the bright idea of pegging a cop car one night, which ended up with 3 of our group getting caught and the other four hiding in an empty hot tub for 2 hours.

I'm 40 now. Let me check some statutes of limitations, do some math, and get back to you.

I did some nasty, nasty stuff when I was a teenager (no, I never killed anyone.) I did stuff that made the front page of the paper and the 6:00 news. I did stuff that, in the post-9/11 world, would get you visits from DHS. All the really juicy stories are things I don't discuss. Not out of some worry about prosecution, but because I am ashamed about what kind of person I was back then.

I was a major asshole as a teenager. I am very, very happy I grew up and wised up before I landed in prison.

I didn't get into much trouble as a teen - my younger brother was the wild child of the family, so he gave my parents all they could handle.

I did pull one stupid stunt one time though. An acquaintance of ours lived up the street and none of us could stand him because he was an annoying douchebag. He comes over one day while a couple of buddies and I were hanging out playing video games. We ignore his knocks on the door and lock him out. He winds up jumping the fence and coming through the back door.

So we called the cops and told them that this guy we didn't want in our house was coming through the back door (not realizing at the time how bad that might sound to a police officer).

A few minutes later we have police coming through the door with guns drawn. Four cop cars pulled up in the yard, neighbors coming out of their houses to gawk. My poor grandmother had just come back from the grocery store to find what looked like a SWAT team storming her house, so she's about to have a heart attack.

The kid we locked out is absolutely terrified, he's crying. The cops are grilling him to death. I found out later there had been a rash of break-ins in the neighborhood, so the cops were on high alert.

Fortunately the cops realized we were scared to death and had a little pity on us. They drove the kid back to his house, gave us a warning about misusing 911, and went on their way. My grandma, however, was not so kind.

Not as extreme as Blackhawk, but lots of drinking and drugging and motorcycling and destroying property and teasing the police. Let's just say that I never expected to live very far into my 20s, and a few of my friends didn't. We were children of the Cold War. We grew up expecting the world to end any day so we didn't put much stock in our futures.

Here's some harmless stupidity: Anybody remember streaking? Me and my friends streaked a bowling alley wearing Nixon masks and yelling "Impeach me! Impeach me!" We didn't figure on an off-duty cop drinking at the bar. All but one of us got away. When we saw our friend at school the next day he had two black eyes and a bad limp. When his father came to collect him the cops had told him that if anything bad happened they'd say he fell down the stairs, so his dad gave them a good show of discipline.

The dumbest thing I ever did was bringing an old, non-working, WWII rifle to an elementary school's ground to film a movie for school (I think it was about the JFK assassination?). It was the afternoon so school was out, but we didn't think about the kids in afterschool. We filmed a few scenes and then came back the next day. As soon as we got there the principal rushed over and asked what we were doing. When we told him, he let us know that the day before kids in afterschool had seen us, freaked out, and the whole afterschool went on lockdown. The cops had been called but we were gone by the time they arrived. The principal was kind enough to let us finish filming our movie in an area of the school where no kids would be around.

This was back in 1995 or so. If that had happened after Columbine, I'm sure we would have been in some serious trouble.

smoking, drinking, vandalism, shoplifting, trespassing, whatever they call it when you flee from the police to avoid a speeding ticket

OK, the absolutely dumbest thing I did involved a 10 speed bicycle, wet roads, bad brakes and a highway. Basically all I did was run a stop sign at a blind intersection on my bike... across a busy highway. You know those car chase scenes in the movies where they fly through intersections to much honking and screeching and fist shaking? Yeah, it was like that only it wasn't a city with slow traffic, it was a 55mph highway and I was on a bike. One car panic braked it's way into a 360 slide into one of the huge ditches by the highway. The driver was ok, but the car was totaled. I didn't find this out until later because I kept on keeping on back to my house... which was only about a block away. I found out when the police knocked on my door about 20 minutes later, while the adrenaline was still pumping. I guess the good thing was one of the local guys (that highway also saw it's share of state troopers). I delivered his newspaper on that very same bicycle every day. He told me it was bad to leave the scene of an accident and about what happened and scared the living crap out of me. He never told my dad. I guess he didn't have any way to prove it was me, but he knew it was. I wasn't exactly incognito in a town of 600 people where I delivered half their papers and was top of the class.

I don't think I ever told anyone about that. If anyone I am ever interviewing with ever sees this, I am making it up as an attention grab and this never happened.

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It was this moment that took the movie from being a little ho-hum to “holy shit, did that shark just eat a plane!?”

The last two months of high school and first 3 months of college I was a heavy drinker. One night we all went downtown to go dancing. We would pull in and drink some pre-made drinks so that we could be lit for most of the night (we were too young to buy beer). We followed this procedure but about 30 minutes in to the night, one of our friends hurt her ankle pretty badly and we had to leave. I drove the whole way from DC to Vienna and from Vienna to Herndon absolutely wasted. I knew I was so, I was laser focused on driving, but I'm sure I didn't keep as tight a line as I remember.

Story ended with me pulling off of the highway because I thought I saw a checkpoint ahead of me. I wheeled around and raced the other way and to my house. Not sure if the police came after me or not.

I totaled out a car, although in my defense I never saw the other car.

I partied every Fri and Sat for years of my life, starting with my senior year in high school. Strangely enough i also got straight A's for the only time in my life during my senior year in high school.

Committed a federal crime via several rounds of "mailbox baseball" in the outskirts of our town one summer. The local paper ran a story, suggesting there were multiple groups doing it, listing the various locations. They were all areas we hit.

dumbest thing I did, childhood edition. when I was 5, school sent pictures home with us in an envelope. I was so excited to show them to my dad that I decided to take them to him at work and started walking down the main drag. good thing he took that street on his way home to get my mother, who was freaking out.

teen-edition. jumping from railroad overpass into a fast moving river. going down a rocky road on a street bike, no helmet (those weren't common then). late teen edition, riding around with one of the biggest dumbass friends when he decided to swerve on a wet road. ended up in the ditch looking back the way we came. riding with another dumbass friend while hitting 110 in a sirocco down a farming road where "slow, tractor" signs all about.

One of the dumbest things I did as a teenager involved trains. My friend and I for for some reason decided it would be cool to climb up one of the train lights over a track that was really close to our neighborhood.

This light was one of those U shaped lights, with ladders on both sides. We got to the top and of course a train came screaming around the corner. I tried to be mature and told my friend not to panic and try and make it down as that would be more dangerous, and falling from that distance would be very bad.

So, we each grabbed a hold of one of the lights and held on for dear life. Our faces were scalded/severely sunburnt after the train passed. That seemed like the longest train of all time.

I also did the driving with people that were too drunk to be driving thing, and thank God nothing ever happened.

I did a lot of stupid shit. I took out the school intercom system for an entire year, removed all the window latches one winter, pried up tiles, blew up a toilet, etc....

There was a girl a few years older than me, her mom owned the video store and she worked there. Real sweetheart, a little slow and just the kind of girl you look at as a sister. This one dude we knew a little did some bad shit to her, and I knew a couple of hard guys that wanted to make it right. My buddy and I went along thinking we were all going to tune him up a little, thought we could show the guys that we were tough too.

Shit got way, way outta control. I learned that there is a big difference between petty kid stuff and hard crime. Been flying straight ever since.

First thing that came to mind to me was climbing down a railroad trestle with some friends. It was about three stories high over a river. I think we saw some other kids do it so decided to give it a try. So we hang down from the railroad tracks and swing over to the iron frame and start making our way down. It was not safe with large gaps where it was tough to find places to put your feet. I can recall being pretty scared at a few points but we managed to climb down to one of the concrete supports without incident. After we finished another group of kids decided to do it and I recall one kid had a bit too much momentem in swinging to the next support and almost stepped through which would have had him falling down. I recall him saying "not that way" and grinning but I'm sure he was shitting himself.

The other thing that came to mind was similar to what was mentioned before. Throwing frisbees/rocks at cars with the neighborhood kids. We hit one car that skidded to a stop after it happened. The guy in the car yelled "FUCKING PUSSIES!!!!!" and the next thing we know there's a couple of adults getting out of the car and chasing all of us. We hid in some woods near by for awhile then booked it home. Don't think they caught anyone but that was some scary shit. I also narrowly missed hitting a cop car with a frisbee at one point - was so glad at that.

How about playing golf in the house? Yeah, that didn't play out too well as you could guess. I had one of those Nerf indoor miniput sets, and instead of using their rubber balls, I decided it would be a brilliant idea to use a real golf ball and try hitting it as hard as I could. End result was a large hole in our front window which needed replacing.

~Practicing archery inside the house, leading to many arrows flying out through the outside wall and siding.

~When I was 12, our apartment had a small hole in the bathroom wall where the doorknob had hit it. I entertained myself for months by spraying hairspray in and holding up a lit match, causing a colorful gout of flame. I got carried away with the hairspray one time and blew a ten foot section of wall off of the opposite side, landing it right on top of my father's bed.

~[REDACTED] - nah, I'll keep that one to myself.

~Homemade napalm. 'nuff said.

~Mailbox baseball. We had a bat we'd cut the handle off of, filled with concrete, then welded the handle back on.

~My old truck had a concave hood where someone had jumped. We used to go the mall, fill the hood up with rubbing alcohol (it held two bottles), then light it, driving around with flames shooting six feet over the top of the truck, all while cranking Gregorian chants.

~Homemade thermite. 'nuff said.

~Got into an autoduel down the main drag in Terre Haute. I cut some guy off, he got pissed, swerved in front of me and hit his brakes. He had a shiny new truck. I had my old dent-covered '73 Ford - so I just rammed him. He tried to sideswipe me. I let him, then returned the favor. This continued for probably a mile. When we got done, my truck looked the same. His, by that point, looked like mine.

~Used to take the passenger's side headlight out, find alleys and floor it, knocking every trash can we saw flying into the air, or crushing it under the wheels.

~Found a plumbing store that hadn't locked up their back storage. Stole all the toilets and distributed them to phone booths around town.

~Military smoke grenades. 'nuff said.

~As an aside, didja know that smoke grenades used to use the same fuse as the souvenir empty grenades? Yeah.

~Me, my friend, and his girlfriend in my truck. Road closed sign. You can guess the rest.

Now keep in mind that these were my 'mild' examples. I was a horribly screwed up, destructive little shit when I was a teenager. My childhood had left me that way, and it wasn't until I was 19 and found myself with a son that I realized what I had become and turned things around. A few folks around here know my story, and my greatest source of pride is the fact that, as an adult, I have ended up nothing like what I was raised to be by my father. I am still absolutely amazed that I was never arrested.

1) Sold and smoked lots of marijuana (aka ganja) with a friend. Junior/Senior years.

2) Broke up with the sexiest girl I'd ever get with. Not saying the prettiest or the most attractive; just the curviest and most sensual personification of female pulchritude I'd ever meet. But who knew at the time? See 1)

3) Helped a friend torch his car for the insurance. Don't do stupid shit like this for friendship's sake. Especially as next week that friend might imply you were acting on your own and maybe he might need some money to stay quiet about the whole incident. See 1).

I'm a fairly peaceful guy - but I did get into a lot (four or five a year) fistfights in H.S. - but I learned that people who look too spaced out (see 1) above) or just easy-going can seem to invite aggression. So while I don't regret not walking away from a fight as a teen, I do regret not making it clear up-front that there would be trouble if I were pushed.

But I'm much quieter now. Don't do any of that anymore. Not like hepcat anyhow. Remember that drover he shot through the mouth and his teeth came out the back of his head? Back in Wichita?

« Last Edit: August 28, 2013, 09:49:10 PM by JohnathanStrange »

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You just don't give up do you? You seize life by the throat and shake it like a topless bartender mixing a martini! -- Mayor Adam West

This.. I once posted and them promptly removed somethings I've done in my youth. I am surprised and blessed I never saw the inside of a jail... I came from a fairly well adjusted middle class family but I did some very dumb shit in high school and picked back up once I ETS from the Army.